Now more than ever, the experience of scrolling through TikTok feels like accidentally stumbling into people’s lives. Whether it’s a hastily filmed car vlog, an OOTD in the street or messy makeup tutorial, every video seems to begin with its creator clunkily shaking their camera before stabilising it and placing it down.
This startled start has been coined the “Gen Z shake” by @homegirlzay, and once you notice it, it’s impossible not to see it everywhere. It’s a subtle, ubiquitous way of breaking the fourth wall. The Gen Z shake seems to suggest that although the creator is aware they’re being perceived, they really didn’t plan to be. “I’m here, but I’m not trying too hard,” it seems to say. “A thought just popped into my head that I simply couldn’t wait to share. So I just lurched for my phone without overthinking it.”
As the mannerism is somewhat exclusive to those born in and around the 2000s, it’s being cast as this generation’s Millennial pause. For the not-chronically-online among you, this is the split-second of hesitation millennials inadvertently take before they start recording themselves. The term went viral after an article published six months ago by The Atlantic suggested it was a sign that the original digital natives were being aged out of the internet. Gen Z meanwhile, are so used to filming themselves, they don’t even need to wait to set up before they press the record button.
Although media platforms like to claim the two are “at war” with one another — with Gen Z incessantly trolling “cheugy” millennials for things like skinny jeans, avocados and Harry Potter — it’s far more insightful to look at generational identities like time capsules. When certain groups experience defining moments together at the same time and roughly the same age, it typically manifests in specific online behaviours. Many of these serve as digital anthropological markers to the prevailing zeitgeist of the time.
“Millennials were the first generation to find a lot of success on the internet but it was still something that they were shamed for using,” says TikTok trend forecaster Coco Mocoe. “It was seen as narcissistic, so perfection became their safety net. Like, ‘Yeah I’m being shamed for being on Instagram, but at least my feed looks good, so it’s legitimate’.”
On the internet of yesteryear, influencers would preen their socials, curating a carefully colour coded, deliciously aspirational highlights reel. However, while you once might have been shunned as a Tumblr blogger if you didn’t own a professional DSLR, now it’s all about finding the cheapest, most low-res digital camera out there. Haste has replaced consideration – with imperfect, seemingly low-effort content among the most ferociously fetishised. It’s casual Instagram all over again.
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“While Millennials were adjacent to the internet, Gen Z was forced online,” Coco continues. “In order to compete in school or their career they had to be present online, whether they wanted to or not.” This is especially true since the pandemic, during which the absence of classrooms, IRL exhibitions and places for general cultural exchange meant that practically every young person was forced to develop an online persona. If not on social media, then on Zoom or LinkedIn.
According to a 2022 study, up to 1.3 million young people in the UK are trying to make a living by creating social media content. It’s easy to see why, at a time when opportunities in the real world are so sparse, and the allure of online attention has been dangled in front of them, since birth, like a carrot. “For many industries, Gen Z accepts they have to be perceived online as a kind of pay-to-play. But there’s a lot of resentment for this, and their way of pushing back against it is approaching everything they do online as ironic,” says Coco. “This is Gen Z’s safety net. If I ever decide that I don’t want to be perceived on the internet, they can fall back on that, ‘Oh well I wasn’t even trying’.”
It may sound contradictory, but that’s because social media is eating itself. Everything is trending at once, and the overexposure is making it all cringe. So now we’re being meta about it, because we want you to know that we know we’re being cringe. There are so many layers of irony that no one really knows if anybody’s being serious or not, suspending us in a constant state of chaos-induced confusion. But we continue posting because what else is there to do, and everybody wants to be famous. Of course, you shouldn’t actually want to be famous, which is why we have to pretend that we’re not trying. But we’re all trying actually, really quite hard.